In today's tutorial, I will review how to build a REST API in Yii to connect your application to the cloud, mobile apps, and other services. I'll guide you through Yii's REST API quick start guide and provide context and examples of common requests.

Getting Started With Yii REST APIs

Building REST APIs in Yii is actually fairly straightforward. You can leverage the existing MVC framework, but you're creating a distinct access point that you intend to be accessed by different kinds of services (not website visitors).

The Benefits of the Yii REST Framework

The Yii Framework provides broad support and detailed documentation for building APIs. Here are some of the built-in capabilities when building APIs:

Quick prototyping with support for common APIs for Active Record. This allows you to quickly and easily expose data model CRUD functionality via an API.

Response format negotiation (supporting JSON and XML by default). There's built-in support for returning data in common output formats.

Customizable object serialization with support for selectable output fields. It's easy to modify what data is returned.

In closing, building a basic REST API with the Yii MVC framework is quite simple. The Yii team has done a great job standardizing functionality for a very important requirement, REST APIs. I hope you've enjoyed learning about them.